It is widely known that linear effects such as wavelength dispersion and polarization dispersion in an optical fiber lead to distortions in a time-domain waveform such as broadening of a pulse, ripples, and a shift in position of center time. Especially in ultrahigh-speed time-division multiplexed transmission at a speed higher than or equal to 40 Gb/s per channel, waveform distortions resulting from third-order or higher-order dispersion and polarization-mode dispersion have a great effect.
Compensation for second-order dispersion by a dispersion compensating fiber or a grating, simultaneous compensation for second-order and third-order dispersion by a reverse-dispersion slope fiber, compensation for dispersion through the use of a phase-conjugate element, and others have been put forth to compensate for the effects of linear distortions in an optical fiber transmission line, and a dispersion-flattened fiber transmission line has been equivalently implemented.
Conventional technologies reported by Pelusi et al. compensate for third-order and fourth-order dispersion by applying a linear chirp to a signal by means of a fiber having an appropriate amount of second-order dispersion before transmission and then performing sinusoidal phase modulation or cosine phase modulation depending on the magnitude of third-order or fourth-order dispersion of the transmission fiber (see patent document 1, non-patent documents 1 and 2). It has been reported that other conventional technologies can compensate for third-order and fourth-order dispersion of a transmission line simultaneously by selecting appropriate amplitude and timing of cosine phase modulation (see non-patent documents 3 and 4). With these technologies, 1.28 Tb/s−70 km optical time-division multiplexed transmission can be successfully performed. Use of an optical Fourier transform has been suggested to compensate for group delay resulting from polarization-mode dispersion (non-patent document 5) to (patent document 2, non-patent document 5).
Patent document 1: JP 2001-111490A
Patent document 2: JP 2002-541720A
Non-Patent Document 1
M. D. Pelusi, Y. Matsui, and A. Suzuki, “Phase modulation of stretched optical pulses for suppression of third-order dispersion effects in fiber transmission,” Electron. Lett. Vol. 34, pp. 1675-1677 (1998)
Non-Patent Document 2
M. D. Pelusi, Y. Matsui, and A. Suzuki, “Fourth-order dispersion suppression of ultrashort optical pulses by second-order dispersion and cosine phase modulation,” Opt. Lett. Vol. 25, pp. 296-298 (2000)
Non-Patent Document 3
T. Yamamoto and M. Nakazawa, “Third- and fourth-order active dispersion compensation with a phase modulator in a terabit-per-second optical time-division multiplexed transmission,” Opt. Lett. Vol. 26, pp. 647-649 (2001)
Non-Patent Document 4
M. Nakazawa, T. Yamamoto, and K. R. Tamura, “1.28 Tbit/s−70 km OTDM transmission using third- and fourth-order simultaneous dispersion compensation with a phase modulator,” ECOC 2000, PD. 2.6
Non-Patent Document 5
M. Romagnoli, P. Franco, R. Corsini, A. Schffini, and M. Midrio, “Time-domain Fourier optics for polarization-mode dispersion compensation,” Opt. Lett. Vol. 24, pp. 1197-1199 (1999)